New Frontiers | Our WorkImpact Management for Social Equity

In 2024, with support from the Tipping Point Fund on Impact Investing, Impact Frontiers collaborated with the following expert panel to build consensus on impact management practices to advance social equity:

• Erika Seth Davies: Chief Executive Officer at Rhia Ventures and Founder of The Racial Equity Asset Lab (The REAL).
• Tynesia Boyea-Robinson: Founder, President and CEO, CapEQ.
• Cathy Clark: Faculty Director at The Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Founding Director of the CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing, along with team members Carrie Gonnella and Kandasi Griffiths.
• Rebecca Fries: CEO and Co-founder of Value for Women, along with team members Erica Berthelsen and Asya Troychansky.
• Heather Krause, PStat: Founder of We All Count Project for Data Equity.

View the video below for an overview for the project:

Specifically, we synthesized knowledge across the domains of racial equity, gender equity, and data equity alongside our disciplinary grounding in impact management to advance social equity through the following two workstreams:

I. Centering Social Equity in the Norms

Impact Frontiers conducted a social equity audit of the Norms of Impact Management facilitated by the Impact Management Project (IMP) and now stewarded by Impact Frontiers. These include the five dimensions of impact, ABC classification, and investor contribution.

We began by engaging our expert panel to review the full text of the Norms on the Impact Frontiers website through the lens of their respective fields of expertise and suggest revisions. Proposed changes were then shared with our practitioner community for feedback through public consultation. Based on this consultation, we revised the Norms pages of the Impact Frontiers website to integrate social equity considerations as fundamental elements of impact management practice. As a result of this effort, users of the Norms will be better equipped to facilitate equitable outcomes for all people and communities.

A white paper summarizes the feedback from expert and public consultation in six cross-cutting themes and outlines the revisions that were made for each:

Theme #1	Recognizing investor roles in the impact ecosystem: Investors and enterprises are named as entities that experience impact (financial or otherwise) from their own activities. As framers of the impact management process, investors and enterprises are invited to reflect on how their own contexts, beliefs, worldviews, and values influence their decision-making.
Theme #2	Incorporating voices of affected people and communities: The Norms provide guidance on a broader set of community engagement approaches adapted from frameworks used in civic engagement, participatory research, and evaluation.
Theme #3	Identifying and understanding causes of inequity: Investors and enterprises are encouraged to assess outcome data in relation to thresholds to understand how experiences of positive and negative outcomes differ based on social identities (e.g., race, gender, age). The Norms provide guidance on identifying the specific barriers that people experiencing negative outcomes face due to historic and/ or current marginalization in order to develop strategies that facilitate equitable outcomes.
Theme #4	Using social identity data equitably: The Norms explain how segmentation on the basis of social identities (e.g., race, gender, age) can help identify outcome inequities that might otherwise go unaddressed. Guidance on data disaggregation incorporates data equity and ethics principles to minimize unintended harm to marginalized people and communities through collection and use of personal data.
Theme #5	Using research methods equitably: The Norms present a broader range of research methods to evaluate enterprise contribution, while seeking to avoid causing harm to marginalized communities through research.
Theme #6	Addressing social equity in the “Risk” dimension: Implicit social equity considerations in existing impact risk types have been made explicit. The Norms include a new impact risk type focused on the risk of perpetuating inequities.

The full set of revisions can be viewed in an appendix.

II. IMM Practices for Social Equity

Impact Frontiers developed guidance on emerging impact management practices for investors pursuing social equity. Acknowledging the multidisciplinary nature of impact management for social equity, we began with an in-depth literature review and collaborated with our expert panel to integrate best practices from both investing and related fields, such as civic engagement, philanthropy, international development, and social sciences.

Impact Frontiers synthesized findings from these resources with a focus on areas of impact management where guidance for pursuing social equity may differ from or go beyond what is considered good impact management practice “as usual.”  After sharing the draft guidance via a public consultation document and soliciting practitioner feedback through a series of  open-invite webinars, we revised and finalized the guidance. 

The resulting guidance document is organized according the four steps of impact management:

Practitioners may review guidance on all four steps in the full document, or jump to the step that interests them:

1. Set Strategy
2. Integrate
3. Optimize
4. Reinforce

For a high-level overview of the guidance, refer to the Executive Summary.